Stanford University, home to many of America’s brightest mind



Stanford University, home to many of America’s brightest mind. In the heart of Silicon Valley, it’s long served as a breeding ground for technological whiz kids. Getting in here though is no mean feat: only about one in fourteen applicants make the grade. And then you have to fund it. A four-year education carries a $160,000 price tag.

But there is a way to sample Stanford’s academic excellence even if you don’t have the economic or the intellectual prowess to compete with the elite. One professor, from Stanford, is on a mission, to make a top-notch education available to anyone, anywhere, for nothing.

This is the university that Sebastian Thrun build – Udacity.

`Sumi, welcome. This is our office here.

`Thank you’

`This is how a 21st century university looks like. There’s no lecture halls, no professors.

`Incredibly, this skeleton staff is handling more than 100,000 students currently enrolled in a handful of computer science classes. `Udacity’ is a play on the word `audacity’, appropriate for a company looking to overhaul higher learning as we know it.

`Our mission is to bring high-quality education, it’s the same as university qualification, to everybody in the world for free. So I take issues with an education system as elitist, that is exclusive – it’s hard to get in.’

Students attend class by watching a series of bite-sized tutorials and master concepts by taking frequent quizzes and submitting homework like writing code.’

`The classroom setting is not great for most of the students, it’s either to slow or too fast, and rather than taking the time it takes to make a student really strong you just tend to give them a bad grade, which is discouraging. So our objective at Udacity right now is to go at the speed that’s right for people, give them the ability to rewind the professor and see something again.

`As you’d expect from a Stanford-inspired education, the courses aren’t for the faint-hearted.

So, five weeks into my course I’ve actually done some coding, I’ve written some basic programs – I know, I’m pretty surprised myself – but I’ve also missed dentist appointments, gym visits and I’m two units behind. I definitely underestimated the time commitment involved. So, it’s no surprise, then, that the drop-out rate for these courses is fairly steep.

But, for those who stay the course, a certificate, useful to waive in front of a potential employer, not to mention a wise business move for the company.’

`So we’re currently working on methods to get the strongest students CVs to employers so employers can hire them. It costs us about a dollar to administer a class to a student, whereas in the classic model it costs more than a thousand dollars, right? So if a company were to pay I mean hypothetically ten bucks for a good referral, one hundred bucks for a good referral, you’ d have everything financed.

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